Wikipedia: Interstellar travel/Talk

Is interstellar space travel possible? Large questions of this kind would make interesting articles, keeping in mind to maintain neutral point of view and to make it work with the structure of other articles. So, on with the article.

It is probably worth having a seperate page for treatments of this subject in /Fiction?. With a few rare, honourable exceptions, fictional treatments of this subject make no attempt to coincide with reality. If you are interested in real world issues on this question, you can safely ignore Star Trek and almost every Hollywood movie about space.

Some random headers for paragraphs I will write later if no-one does it first.

possibility of new physics allowing faster than light travel

possibility of reaching other stars by travelling slower than light, faster version

and slower version

A couple of thoughts on the topic:

There's a comment, (possibly by the english physiologist [J. B. S. Haldane]?) that might be worth tracking down, that interstellar travel is more a problem in biology than technology: ie. the problem is our short lifespans compared with the travel times...I think it was Haldane (or possibly [Olaf Stapledon]?) who came up with the idea of multigeneration 'arks' for interstellar travel.

This is a very interesting article so far, and thanks to whoever has been working on it!

As a relatively minor point, can I ask you please not to write in the first person? It's rather grating in an encyclopedia article. --LMS

Someone (with more physics knowledge than me) should talk about time dilation, which as I understand it means that while it will still take more than one year to travel one light-year, the slowing down of time for those on board the ship as its speed approached the speed of light would mean that those on board would experience the trip as taking as little time as one wants. (Of course, there is a limit here due to the amount of time it takes to accelerate at a rate humans could survive in comparison to the length of the trip...)

Someone should also point out that general relativity may allow the shrinking of the distance between the origin and the destination of the trip, by bending space or creating wormholes.

-- Simon J Kissane

Interstellar travel by humans is a fantasy. Humans will be replaced by robots long before interstellar travel becomes possible.

: I don't think that's a consensus opinion, you haven't stated any reasons why you think that's the case, and interstellar travel

by robots or extra-terrestrials is worth discussing in any case. Robert Merkel

I removed the following from the article (which is very cool!). I'll explain why:

: (*) actually our solar system and Alpha Centauri are moving relative to each other at several kilometres per second, and as far as i can remember, they are moving approximately towards each other, so this should reduce travel time a little. It would still be thousands of years though.

The continents on Earth are moving, too. It doesn't affect our travel plans that much. :-)

We don't have footnote capability yet; just use parentheses. Maybe someone can put this back in the article--I don't really want to edit it myself, mainly because I might screw it up. Also, we want to avoid first person. If the reason you use first person is because you're not sure of something, why are you putting it into an encyclopedia article?

: Time Travel/Talk

Having a link to a talk page in the article itself is not a good idea.

: For information on the technical difficulties of interstellar travel, see Spacecraft Propulsion, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, and Economics.

I'm sorry, but only the first of those pages actually contains any information obviously relevant to the technical difficulties of interstellar travel. Either find more specific pages, or, if you want to make a claim, make a claim: "Our understanding of the technical difficulties of interstellar travel is informed by multiple fields: ..." Don't mislead people into thinking that they're going to be able to find information about the difficulty of interstellar travel just by following those links. --LMS

Robert Zubrin's (the guy behind the [Mars Society]) "Entering Space", where he discusses possible interstellar travel given currently known physics. He comes up with a couple of seemingly feasible systems - fusion powered ships, lightsails powered by lasers, and "magsails" (which would be used in combination with the other systems for braking at the other end). With these systems, one-way trips to Alpha Centuri within a current human lifetime (and, remember, greatly extended human lifespans are entirely feasible given progress in medical research) are at least plausible. Antimatter-powered starships could theoretically permit travel at near-lightspeed (modulo the shielding problem from any stray atoms in the road) but production of antimatter seems likely to be a considerable challenge in economics, to say the least.

Zubrin makes a persuasive and seemingly scientifically reasonable case (but then, I'm not a physicist). Do people think it's worthwhile for me to add some material based on (obviously not copied from) his book? Robert Merkel

Something on Bussard ramjets, as a possible way of getting to high enough speeds that time dilation comes in?

: unfortunately, it turns out that the density of interstellar hydrogen is an order of magnitude less than it was thought to be when Bussard first proposed the design. But I guess it should still be mentioned, as an idea which didn't pan out. BD

Maybe a discussion of the possibilities and difficulties of suspended animation? Vicki Rosenzweig